Rita Marley is characteristically vague about her conversion to Rastafarianism, but every once in a while a startling revelation creeps into the prose. When Bob Marley returned to Jamaica, he greeted his increasingly Rastafarianized wife with a line that should live in infamy: ''What happened to your hair?'' While he was gone, his wife became increasingly devoted to Rastafarianism, to which he had first exposed her: she was part of the group that greeted Ethiopia's emperor, Haile Selassie, when he visited Jamaica, and she says she glimpsed a black stigma mark on his palm. They spent their wedding night at the National Stadium in Kingston, where the Wailers were performing with the Jackson Five, and then, two days later, Bob Marley left for an unhappy eight-month sojourn in Delaware. Their marriage was partly a matter of convenience: the couple thought that being married would make it easier for Rita to visit her husband in Delaware. He'd have me by the hand, walking me, come on, Rita.'' He proved his devotion by protecting her from the advances of his ''very touchy'' bandmate, Peter Tosh. ''From that day on,'' she writes, ''when you'd see Bob, I'd be his tail. (Reggae, a slower and heavier descendant of ska, was born a few years later, in 1968.) Her group, the Soulettes, was hired to sing back-up for the Wailers and, after a brief courtship, the two became inseparable, much to the consternation of Rita's aunt. When she met her future husband, she was a single mother and aspiring singer, and he was a member of an emerging ska group called the Wailers. ''After the mourners left,'' she writes, ''I climbed in.'' Then there was the girl herself, who found an ingenious way to get the ribbons and flowers she loved: she'd head to the local cemetery and find a fresh grave. There was the tough-talking grandmother, Yaya, who smoked cigars ''backward, with the fire end in her mouth.'' There was the father who emigrated to London and didn't invite Rita, and there was the mother who remarried - and likewise didn't invite Rita. (Her co-author is Hettie Jones, who chronicled her marriage to LeRoi Jones in the memoir ''How I Became Hettie Jones.'') She gives us bits and pieces of her life and his without ever quite surrendering to the pleasures and dangers of memory.Įven in her own unsentimental recounting, Rita Anderson's childhood seems like a colorful caricature of Jamaican poverty. For better and for worse, this is also how she wrote her moving, sometimes frustrating book. seemed to have happened not to me but to another person.'' This, it appears, is how Rita Marley survived her years with Bob Marley: by sitting down every night to unlive the day. By bedtime, she writes, ''everything I'd gone through. In her memoir, ''No Woman No Cry,'' Rita Marley explains that she made it through this ordeal by refusing to dwell on it.
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They had been married since 1966, but their marriage was full of breaks and partings, and the house on Hope Road marked yet another break: it was his place, not hers.Īfter the altercation at Hope Road, Rita Marley never talked to her husband again - never, that is, until later in the day, when he came to visit his wife and children at their barren new house in Bull Bay. This was an odd exchange, not least because the woman in question was Rita Marley, Bob Marley's wife.
Whatever she said, it worked: Marley forked over some cash, and the woman got back in the truck and sped off toward her new home. She also mentioned that she was moving out of her aunt's shack in Trench Town and needed money. She told him off and called his girlfriend a whore. The commotion was enough to rouse the singer, who came out to talk to the woman. A purposeful-looking woman got out and exchanged some intemperate words with Marley's girlfriend, who had spied the truck from the porch. One morning in 1972, a rickety truck arrived at 56 Hope Road, the well-worn Jamaica mansion where Bob Marley held court.
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